Anna Karenina eBook

“Whether he knows or not,” said Vronsky,
in his usual quiet and resolute tone, “that’s
nothing to do with us. We cannot...you cannot
stay like this, especially now.”

“What’s to be done, according to you?”
she asked with the same frivolous irony. She
who had so feared he would take her condition too
lightly was now vexed with him for deducing from it
the necessity of taking some step.

“Tell him everything, and leave him.”

“Very well, let us suppose I do that,”
she said. “Do you know what the result
of that would be? I can tell you it all beforehand,”
and a wicked light gleamed in her eyes, that had been
so soft a minute before. “’Eh, you love
another man, and have entered into criminal intrigues
with him?’” (Mimicking her husband, she
threw an emphasis on the word “criminal,”
as Alexey Alexandrovitch did.) “’I warned
you of the results in the religious, the civil, and
the domestic relation. You have not listened
to me. Now I cannot let you disgrace my name,—­’”
“and my son,” she had meant to say, but
about her son she could not jest,—­“’disgrace
my name, and’—­and more in the same
style,” she added. “In general terms,
he’ll say in his official manner, and with all
distinctness and precision, that he cannot let me
go, but will take all measures in his power to prevent
scandal. And he will calmly and punctually act
in accordance with his words. That’s what
will happen. He’s not a man, but a machine,
and a spiteful machine when he’s angry,”
she added, recalling Alexey Alexandrovitch as she
spoke, with all the peculiarities of his figure and
manner of speaking, and reckoning against him every
defect she could find in him, softening nothing for
the great wrong she herself was doing him.

“But, Anna,” said Vronsky, in a soft and
persuasive voice, trying to soothe her, “we
absolutely must, anyway, tell him, and then be guided
by the line he takes.”

“What, run away?”

“And why not run away? I don’t see
how we can keep on like this. And not for my
sake—­I see that you suffer.”

“Yes, run away, and become your mistress,”
she said angrily.

“Anna,” he said, with reproachful tenderness.

“Yes,” she went on, “become your
mistress, and complete the ruin of...”

Again she would have said “my son,” but
she could not utter that word.

Vronsky could not understand how she, with her strong
and truthful nature, could endure this state of deceit,
and not long to get out of it. But he did not
suspect that the chief cause of it was the word—­son,
which she could not bring herself to pronounce.
When she thought of her son, and his future attitude
to his mother, who had abandoned his father, she felt
such terror at what she had done, that she could not
face it; but, like a woman, could only try to comfort
herself with lying assurances that everything would
remain as it always had been, and that it was possible
to forget the fearful question of how it would be
with her son.